Change list for Alpha 1.7
- CTF-Face has been reworked to function as a map in ACTF!
- Increased respawn time from 7 seconds to 12.
- Replication Of Hud Elements for team advantage and match timer acts very strangely right now.
- Minideemer secondary causes the game to crash.
- Remove flag from player inventory rather than apply 9999 damage for entering the base. (Fixed)
- Rather than simply remove the flag from the player when they enter the base they receive 9999 damage. (Fixed)
- Item Specific Buy and sell menu delay. Prevent accidental double clicks.
- Fixed bug where you lose armor if you click it in the buy menu and you dont have enough money for it.
- Round Timer goes away randomly during a match for no reason. (Hopefully fixed)
- Red Team advantage didnt go away after Half Time. (Fixed)

Old Info below this point ================================>

Change list for Alpha 1.6
- Items that you cannot afford will now appear grey when in buy menu.
- Boosting should now be possible.
- Buffed the Striker
- Improved visibility of credit text on HUD.
- Level shell for HardWall is simplified to reduce file size.
- Sky should no longer be overly bloomy.

Change list for Alpha 1.5
- Major bug to fix buying and selling of items. Everything is now handled properly without hacks so you always get proper results from buying and selling items.

Change list for Alpha 1.4
- periodic income bug has been fully addressed.
- Completely revamped the round system so that the mode has 2 minute rounds.
- Completely revamped the buying and selling system so now you can sell weapons back for half their current value.
- 3 new weapons have been added to the game!
-- The Minideemer : This is a weaker version of the redeemer and is very inexpensive.
-- The Ripper (Created by Wail) : This is a working version of the Ripper from earlier UT games.
-- The Striker : This is a super high tier sniper rifle that fires a fast volley of projectiles for massive damage.
- One team will have an advantage at the start of the round. This advantage means that they will score if the round timer reaches zero. After half time the other team will have the advantage.
- Score system now gives bonuses for killing sprees as well as multi kills. These bonuses stack with flag captures, flag returns and assists. The higher your spree the more credits you get from bonuses.
- Prices have been greatly adjusted. ( Keg and Chest armor are now much more expensive.)
- Cannot enter bases with the flag. (Right now it will instantly kill you if you try. Sorry to those who have the flag on a round reset. lol )
- All weapons you have will drop on death.
- Bots now get random weapons and armor. (its a quick job and they still act very buggy right now)
- Many bug fixes and tweaks across the board.

Change list for Alpha 1.3
- Health and ammo resets when entering a buy zone.
- Health defaults to 200 and can be increased to 300 when you purchase a Keg O Health.
- Team Damage is off by default.
- Between round timer reduced to 10 seconds (Down from 20)
- Both teams earn $200 every 30 seconds of round time. (Will not exceed $2000 credits)
- Renamed Armor and health to display the amount you get when you buy them.
- Added a basic safety delay to prevent you from buying the same item twice.
- Fresh player starts with $1000 when joining a game in progress.
- Everyone always starts with $1000 at the start of a match.
- Prices on all items have been adjusted.
- Player kills now reward $400. ( up from $200)
- Respawn timer reduced to 7 seconds (Down from 20)
- Ability to buy an instant respawn. (Price goes down as the respawn timer goes down.)

New Weapon Mechanic.
- Bio Rifle secondary now creates a large high damage AOE.
- Bio Rifle ammo allows for up to two fully charged shots.
- Bio Rifle ammo can only be replenished by buying a new Bio Rifle or picking one up from someones body.

ACTF-Hardwall
- Size of the level greatly increased.
- Central bridge added with a gate that lowers when pressing a button.
- Button and gate only reset once the round has ended.
- Jump boots can now be access once you lower the gate under the bridge.

Comment

Finally got an opportunity to play this tonight. This works out a lot better than you might expect! We had some fun on this, and there was some back and forth, with us losing something like 7 rounds in a row then turning it around to win like 9 in a row and close it out.

Suggestions:

- Reset all players to 100 health at the start of the round
- Rounds should end when there are no living enemy players (IMO)

- The overall ruleset right now seems to create snowball effects. There are many ways that this might be countered, whether with weapons pricing, cash rewards, etc. I don't want to suggest too much here but some better way for players to get back into the game might be helpful
- I don't think this is doable right now, but I think that players should be limited to 2 weapons. By the end of our playtest I had all of them.
- Overall time to cap is very short on the map we have. I think it's like 5 seconds from flag to flag. I would actually try to close off the middle walking route to try and force players to run around some more. Right now it's just very easy to grab the flag and make a beeline through middle and UT does not punish 'running out into the open' nearly as much as a CS-like game

In any case, this is awesome work and definitely worth checking out. Hopefully we can continue to get support to make this as polished and tight as possible.

Comment

Finally got an opportunity to play this tonight. This works out a lot better than you might expect! We had some fun on this, and there was some back and forth, with us losing something like 7 rounds in a row then turning it around to win like 9 in a row and close it out.

Suggestions:

- Reset all players to 100 health at the start of the round
- Rounds should end when there are no living enemy players (IMO)

- The overall ruleset right now seems to create snowball effects. There are many ways that this might be countered, whether with weapons pricing, cash rewards, etc. I don't want to suggest too much here but some better way for players to get back into the game might be helpful
- I don't think this is doable right now, but I think that players should be limited to 2 weapons. By the end of our playtest I had all of them.
- Overall time to cap is very short on the map we have. I think it's like 5 seconds from flag to flag. I would actually try to close off the middle walking route to try and force players to run around some more. Right now it's just very easy to grab the flag and make a beeline through middle and UT does not punish 'running out into the open' nearly as much as a CS-like game

In any case, this is awesome work and definitely worth checking out. Hopefully we can continue to get support to make this as polished and tight as possible.

Thanks for testing! I want to keep playing it regularly too. Maybe ill start to do a game at a certain time every night. I wish it was possible to just jump on and find active games like I can with most other things XD

I am going to take a solid look at pretty much all of your feedback for next patch. One thing to mention though is that I have designed the mod to allow for a 20 second respawn timer thus disallowing caps until the other team is dead wont work.

The to do list is pretty decent in size and I plan to remake the level itself. I want to increase the size by a little bit in every direction and make the center lanes a bit more defined. So you can make call outs and its not so cramped.

Current todo list:

* If health is less than 100 reset health to 100 on round reset.
* Rework buying health to just having an option to purchase a mega health for a 800-1000 credits.
* Disable team damage by default. (Down the road ill worry about a hardcore mode.)
* Remake the level to the Liandri theme similar to outpost23.
* Make sure the credit counter is not visible when spectating or after leaving the game.
* Spectators accumulate credits for no reason hehe.

These are issues that are pending blueprint improvements
* Make sure players rotate properly after being teleported back to base.
* Make sure player inventory is interfaced properly through buy menu. Right now buying of items is a giant hack that spawns the item at your feet and is not 100% reliable.
* Unhook game game state from on tick by using proper hooks into the game mode.

All of this outside of reworking the map will be pretty basic things to get done.

Comment

Regarding inventory stuff, I set this up earlier tonight just to experiment and from what I can tell this works fine. Is this how you are spawning inventory items currently?

I what I have learned from doing this like that is the blueprints seem to avoid all of the C++ code for things like checking if you already have the item. Playing the sound when you obtain it. Giving you double enforcers when you buy an enforcer. All of that stuff has to be redone in blueprints which is bad. There needs to be a simple blueprint node that is part of the base game that anyone can use to just give or take items properly.

Comment

Health below 100 resets to 100 on round start. (Actually the buy menu gives 100 health so if you somehow take damage while in the base you can go to the buy menu and get your health back)
You purchase a Keg O Health for 800 instead of 200 for +50 now.
Team Damage is off by default.
Credits reset to 1000 after half time.

I have proper rotation on respawn hooked up but there still seems to be bugs with this.
Ground work in place for the special spectator spawn point area.

Comment

Hi Castle, caught some of m3ss's stream tonight, thought I'd scribble down the ideas I had here:

Pay a $X fee to respawn earlier, and have it cost less the longer you wait

When teams are unbalanced, like 3v2 etc, you could redress the balance a bit by scaling the reward payouts to give the disadvantaged team more money

Let item prices "float", so that as the game goes on, the more popular items become more expensive, and the unpopular items get cheaper ... then over time "the market" would automatically tend toward the "right price" for each item

Comment

Hi Castle, caught some of m3ss's stream tonight, thought I'd scribble down the ideas I had here:

Pay a $X fee to respawn earlier, and have it cost less the longer you wait

When teams are unbalanced, like 3v2 etc, you could redress the balance a bit by scaling the reward payouts to give the disadvantaged team more money

Let item prices "float", so that as the game goes on, the more popular items become more expensive, and the unpopular items get cheaper ... then over time "the market" would automatically tend toward the "right price" for each item

Looks like it's got the makings of a fun game so far, great work!

I already have the idea about being able to buy a quicker respawn slated. Though I have to admit the idea of tracking what people buy to increase decrease prices is really interesting.

Comment

Thanks for putting in the work Castle! I agree with Veggie that this game mode has a lot of promise. (Also great suggestions in chat last night Veggie. Thanks for tuning in and giving some thoughts!) Hopefully the feedback from last night helps you a bit. I'd be glad to continue testing and giving ideas/suggestions as you continue to refine this idea.

Comment

Hi Castle, caught some of m3ss's stream tonight, thought I'd scribble down the ideas I had here:

Let item prices "float", so that as the game goes on, the more popular items become more expensive, and the unpopular items get cheaper ... then over time "the market" would automatically tend toward the "right price" for each item

Looks like it's got the makings of a fun game so far, great work!

I think this is an interesting idea, one that I favor for internal development... but for actual play I think it's going to make the gameplay very odd. It could be quite frustrating to want to buy a certain gun, only to find out it costs more money than you thought next round because your teammate also bought the same gun.

Comment

… for actual play I think it's going to make the gameplay very odd. It could be quite frustrating to want to buy a certain gun, only to find out it costs more money than you thought next round …

Yeah that's a good point. It certainly could become a problem, but then, maybe there's also a just-as-good way to address that. Let's see …

If it's only a matter of misaligned expectations, or unpleasant surprise at a price having changed, then this might all be nothing more than a messaging issue. That, I imagine, could be remedied by carefully wording the UI text, say e.g. "Current Price: $1457" — the word "current" and the oddly non-round numbers should be huge clues leading the user to infer, at the very least, that the prices displayed are not constant, and likely to change.

From here I think it's entirely reasonable to expect that, within just a few minutes of having learned this, most users would then surmise without further prompting that the prices they're seeing must be changing in response to something … and that most would then correctly presume the dynamic to be nothing more than simple supply-and-demand.

And from that realization comes the natural emergence of all the mind-games-within-the-game of attempting to maximize one's purchasing power, such as:

- by being first! to buy Desirable Item X before its price rises; or
- by guessing that others / "the market" will disregard Specialty Item Y long enough for its price to fall to a better value; or
- by correctly reasoning that Item Z is currently under/over-priced now that the server has switched to a new map where Item Z is more/less useful, and exploiting that; or
- by … well I'm sure this list could probably go on for a while, but IANAEconomist

Although, come to think …

Certainly at some point one has to wonder about also offering a feature to Sell items you've purchased, of course at a different price than what you bought them for, i.e. current market rates, and probably also subject to a X% per-transaction fee.

And from the Sell feature follows the emergence of an arbitrage submarket: "Buy low early, sell high later."

And maybe each player's Daily Inventory could persist between map-switches on a server (for that day only), in which case a player on Map X might see the value of Item Y skyrocket/plummet as the server switches to Map Z, and then exploit those market forces accordingly.

And … well, suffice it to say, it seems like things could get very interesting very quickly.

And yes, "meanwhile a game of CTF broke out" … but all told, I do think there's a big fat metric poo-ton of depth and bang-for-the-buck to be mined out of this, as most of these interesting dynamics are just naturally emergent market behaviors, requiring relatively little implementation effort.

To that I don't have a good answer … or at least none better than one along the lines of, "That's …… teamwork!", sung to a particular comedic melody.

AFAICT, that "which teammate buys X first" dynamic would seem to directly correspond to the entirely familiar "teamwork problems" of how, e.g.: teammates in TDM must learn to share and hand-off weapons/armor; how teammates in CTF must readily adjust their roles amongst attack–cover–seal–defend as conditions dictate; or how teammates in VCTF/ONS/WAR must learn to work it out amongst themselves (and indeed sometimes compete internally) to determine who gets to drive which vehicles, serve a particular role, etc.

So, likewise, for the most part, I have to think that teammates can and will quite readily learn to play through that "first!" dynamic, similarly understanding it to be "just part of the game".

And here again, just like in the other games, it'd seem to hold true that the very best players/teammates will generally be those with the broadest set of skills, who are adaptable to the widest set of game conditions, compared to those who are "specialists" with (*cough* hyper-addicted to) just one or two favorite weapons or roles — and this can only be a good thing.

Comment

hmm, there really needs to be some serious open discussion about the floating prices idea. Its pretty crazy of a concept.

Though one thing that would be neat would be to be able to spend money to raise the price of something for the other team. Though I just dont know if this is an idea that will be liked by most people or if it would make people hate me for setting it up lol.
However spending money to make something more expensive can have an interesting effect similar to voting what characters the other team can use in League Of Legends.

Honestly I just dont know how something like that would play out!

Anyway, here is a full size comparison to the old level. It feels a lot more open in game. I didn't want to go too crazy with the size increase but I definitely dont want it to feel too cramped. I will also be raising the team size to 5v5 instead of 4v4.

Comment

Ha, well fortunately, the great thing is that it'd be really easy and cheap to start experimenting.

Like, I imagine, just nudge an item's price upward by 1.01X (or whatever) after each purchase, and at the same time use a timer to continually nudge all the prices downward by 0.9999X (or whatever) once per second. (Or maybe don't do that, and just let the accumulating reward payouts inflate the economy. I don't know.) Shouldn't have to be much more complicated than that.

Whatever the approach, it'd probably be smart to be conservative at first, so as to err on the side of the effect being all but unnoticeable … and then crank it up later if it looks like the system is working OK.

No reasonable UT persons are going to hate on you for trying that. (And of course, all UT persons everywhere are nothing if not reasonable. HA HA)